Are Tories funny? Of course, with the exception of Jim Davidson. Expressing amazement that they might be funny is like saying that because someone has different political views from us they can't have a sense of humour. Yet this appears to be exactly what Helena Bonham Carter did in an interview at the weekend, when she insisted her friend David Cameron was "not a rightwing person", citing his "hilarious sense of humour, which nobody really knows about".

Bernard Manning was funny. And racist and misogynistic too, but the jokes were good even if the laughter died on your lips. Peter Cook spent much of his life savaging Labour politicians, but there's no doubt that he was funny. You might recall the Tory rally in 1983 when Kenny Everett spoke for Margaret Thatcher. Everett was a comic near-genius, whose TV show was adored by his largely young audience. "Let's bomb Russia – let's kick Michael Foot's stick away!" he shouted to cheers. The remarks were clearly meant as much as anything as satire against the Tories, but various prune-faced persons acted as if they had been meant seriously. Everett later said he regretted appearing at the rally – he was not really a Tory, he said, but didn't like Arthur Scargill.

The Tory minister and diarist Alan Clark had a ferocious, whip-like wit. Boris Johnson: you might not like his style, but he can make even those who despise him laugh. In private, David Davis has a silky wit – he said of a stiff colleague: "He wears pinstripe suits, and the pinstripe goes all the way through." Churchill was funny enough for almost every political gag between 1900 and 1965 to be attributed to him, whether he said it or not. Harold Macmillan had a very dry sense of humour: told about Ed Muskie withdrawing from the US presidential race after he had cried when a paper said his wife was an alcoholic, he expressed amazement. "But Harold, what would you do if a paper said that Lady Dorothy was a drunk?" "I would say, 'You should have seen her mother.'"

Ted Heath did have a sense of humour, at least when it came to assailing Thatcher. Given a jokey chocolate bust of her at a dinner in Brighton, he smiled, picked up his knife and smashed the thing to bits. Thatcher herself had to have jokes explained to her at length, usually without success.

And, as Bonham Carter points out, Cameron has a fine sense of humour, which usually fails when it comes to jokes at his own expense. He loathes Steve Bell drawing him: "Get that condom off my head!" he shouted to the cartoonist at the Tory conference last year.